Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry’s opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours.
There were other people in the park; Larry had spoken to a few of them. They were all pretty much the same, and Larry supposed that he himself wasn’t much different. They were dazed, their speech disjointed, and they seemed helpless to stop reaching for your sleeve with their hands as they talked. They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same. Their friends and relatives were dead or dying. There had been shooting in the streets, there had been an inferno on Fifth Avenue, was it true that Tiffany’s was gone, could that be true? Who was going to clean up? Who was going to collect the garbage? Should they get out of New York? They had heard that troops were guarding all the places where one could hope to do this. One woman was terrified that the rats were going to rise up out of the subways and inherit the earth, reminding Larry uneasily of his own thoughts on the day he had first returned to New York. A young man munching Fritos from a gigantic bag told Larry conversationally that he was going to fulfill a lifetime ambition. He was going to Yankee Stadium, run around the outfield naked, and then masturbate on home plate. “Chance of a lifetime, man,” he told Larry, winked with both eyes, and then wandered off, eating Fritos.
Many of the people in the park were sick, but not many had died there. Perhaps they had uneasy thoughts of being munched for dinner by the animals, and they had crawled indoors when they felt the end was near. Larry had had only one confrontation with death this morning, and one was all he wanted. He had walked up Transverse Number One to the comfort station there. He had opened the door and a grinning dead man with maggots crawling briskly hither and yon on his face had been seated inside, his hands settled on his bare thighs, his sunken eyes staring into Larry’s own. A sickening sweet smell bloated out at Larry as if the man sitting there was a rancid bonbon, a sweet treat which, in all the confusion, had been left for the flies. Larry slammed the door shut, but belatedly: he lost the cornflakes he had eaten for breakfast and then dry-heaved until he was afraid he might rupture some of his inner workings. God; if You’re there, he had prayed as he stumbled back toward the menagerie, if You’re taking requests today, Big Fella, mine is not to have to look at anything else like that today. The kooks are bad enough, something like that is more than I can take. Thank You so much.
Now, sitting on this bench (the monster-shouter had moved out of earshot, at least temporarily), Larry found himself thinking about the World Series five years ago. It was good to remember that because, it now seemed to him, that was the last time he had been completely happy, his physical condition tiptop, his mind resting easily and not working against itself.
That had been just after he and Rudy split up. That had been a damn piss-poor thing, that split-up, and if he ever saw Rudy again (never happen, his mind told him with a sigh), Larry was going to apologize. He would get down and kiss Rudy’s shoetops, if that was what Rudy needed to make it okay again.
They had started off across the country in a wheezy old 1968 Mercury that had shat its transmission in Omaha. From there on they would work for a couple of weeks, hitchhike west for a while, work another couple of weeks, then hitchhike some more. For a while they worked on a farm in western Nebraska, just below the panhandle, and one night Larry had lost sixty dollars in a poker game. The next day he’d had to ask Rudy for a loan to tide him over. They had arrived in L.A. a month later, and Larry had been the first to land a job—if you wanted to call washing dishes for the minimum wage working. One night about three weeks later, Rudy had broached the subject of the loan. He said he’d met a guy who’d recommended a really good employment agency, never miss, but the fee was twenty-five bucks. Which happened to be the amount of the loan he had made to Larry after the poker game. Ordinarily, Rudy said, he never would have asked, but—
Larry had protested that he’d paid the loan back. They were square. If Rudy wanted the twenty-five, okay, but he just hoped Rudy wasn’t trying to get him to pay off the same loan twice.
Rudy said he didn’t want agift ; he wanted the money he wasowed , and he wasn’t interested in a lot of Larry Underwood bullshit, either. Jesus Christ, Larry said, trying a good-humored laugh. I never thought I’d need a receipt from you, Rudy. Guess I was wrong.
It had escalated into a full-scale argument, almost to the point of blows. At the end Rudy’s face had been flushed. That’s you, Larry, he’d shouted. That’s you all over. That’s how you are. I used to think I’d never learn my lesson, but I think I finally did. Fuck off, Larry.
Rudy left, and Larry followed him to the stairs of the cheap rooming house, digging his wallet out of his back pocket. There were three tens neatly folded into the secret compartment behind the photos and he had heaved them after Rudy.Go on, you cheap little lying fuck! Take it! Take the goddam money!
Rudy had slammed the outer door open with a bang and had gone out into the night, toward whatever tin destiny the Rudys of this world can expect. He didn’t look back. Larry had stood at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, and after a minute or so he had looked around for his three ten-dollar bills, gathered them up, and put them away again.
Thinking of the incident now and then over the years, he had become more and more sure that Rudy had been right. Actually, he was positive. Even if hehadpaid Rudy back, the two of them had been friends since grade school, and it seemed (looking back) that Larry had always been a dime short for the Saturday matinee because he’d bought some licorice whips or a couple of candy bars on the way over to Rudy’s, or borrowing a nickel to round out his school lunch money or getting seven cents to make up carfare. Over the years he must have bummed fifty dollars in change from Rudy, maybe a hundred. When Rudy had braced him for that twenty-five, Larry could remember the way he had tightened up. His brain had subtracted twenty-five dollars from the three tens, and had said to him:That only leaves five bucks. Therefore, you already paid him back. I’m not sure just when, but you did. Let’s have no more discussion of the matter . And no more there had been.
But after that he had been alone in the city. He had no friends, hadn’t even attempted to make any at the café on Encino where he worked. The fact was, he’d believed everyone who worked there, from the evil-tempered head cook to the ass-wiggling, gum-chewing waitresses, had been a dipstick. Yes, he had really believed everyone at Tony’s Feed Bag was a dipstick but him, the sainted, soon-to-succeed (and you better believe it) Larry Underwood. Alone in a world of dipsticks, he felt as achy as a whipped dog and as homesick as a man marooned on a desert island. He began to think more and more of buying a Greyhound AmeriPass and dragging himself back to New York.
In another month, maybe even another two weeks, he would have done it, too… except for Yvonne.
He met Yvonne Wetterlen at a movie theater two blocks from the club where she worked as a topless dancer. When the second show let out, she had been weeping and searching around her seat on the aisle for her purse. It had her driver’s license in it, also her checkbook, her union card, her one credit card, a photostat of her birth certificate, and her Social Security card. Although he was positive it had been stolen, Larry did not say so and helped her look for it. And sometimes it seemed they really must live in a world of wonders, because he had found it three rows down just as they were about to give up. He guessed it had probably migrated down there as a result of people shuffling their feet as they watched the picture, which had really been pretty boring. She had hugged him and wept as she thanked him. Larry, feeling like Captain America, told her he wished he could take her out for burgers or something to celebrate, only he was really strapped for cash. Yvonne said she’d treat. Larry, that great prince, had been pretty sure she would.
They started to see each other; in less than two weeks they had a regular thing going. Larry found a better job, clerking in a bookstore, and had gotten a gig singing with a group called The Hotshot Rhythm Rangers & All-Time Boogie Band. The name was the best thing about the group, actually, but the rhythm guitarist had been Johnny McCall, who later went on to form the Tattered Remnants, and that was actually a pretty good band.
Larry and Yvonne moved in together, and for Larry everything changed. Part of it was just having a place, his own place, that he was paying half the rent for. Yvonne put up some curtains, they got some cheap thrift-shop furniture and refinished it together, other members of the band and some of Yvonne’s friends started to drop around. The place was bright in the daytime, and at night a fragrant California breeze, which seemed redolent with oranges even when the only thing it was really redolent with was smog, would drift in through the windows. Sometimes no one would come and he and Yvonne would just watch television, and sometimes she would bring him a can of beer and sit on the arm of his chair and rub his neck. It was his own place, ahome , goddammit, and sometimes he’d lie awake in bed at night with Yvonne sleeping beside him, and marvel at how good he felt. Then he would slip smoothly into sleep, and it was the sleep of the just, and he never did think of Rudy Marks at all. At least, not much.
They lived together for fourteen months, all of it fine until the last six weeks or so, when Yvonne got to be kind of a bitch, and the part of it that summed it all up for Larry was that World Series. He would put in his day at the bookstore, then go over to Johnny McCall’s house and the two of them—the whole group only practiced on weekends, because the other two guys had night jobs—would work on some new stuff or maybe just hack away at the great oldies, the ones Johnny called “real bar-rippers,” tunes like “Nobody but Me” and “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love.”
Then he’d go home, tohishome, and Yvonne would have dinner all ready. Not just TV dinners, shit like that, either. Real home cooking. Girl was well trained. And afterward they would go into the living room and turn on the tube and watch the Series. Later, love. It had seemed all right, it had all seemed his. There hadn’t been one single thing hassling his mind. Nothing had been so good since then. Nothing.
He realized he was crying a little bit, and he felt a momentary disgust that he should be sitting here on a bench in Central Park, crying in the sun like some wretched old man on a pension. Then it occurred to him that he had a right to cry for the things he had lost, that he had a right to be in shock if that was what this was.
His mother had died three days ago. She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell’s babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn’t known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in mid-heave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire. He had crouched beside her for ten minutes or so, not knowing what to do, thinking in a confused way that he ought to wait until a death certificate was signed or someone asked him what had happened. But it was obvious what had happened, it was happening everywhere. It was just as obvious that the place was a madhouse. No sober young doctor was going to come along, express sympathy, and then start the machinery of death. Sooner or later his mother would just be carried away like a sack of oats, and he didn’t want to watch that. Her purse was under the cut. He found a pen and a bobby pin and her checkbook. He tore a deposit slip from the back of her book and wrote on it her name, her address, and after a moment’s calculation, her age. He clipped it to her blouse pocket with the bobby pin and began to cry. He kissed her cheek and fled, crying. He felt like a deserter. Being on the street had been a little better, although at that time the streets had been full of crazy people, sick people, and circling army patrols. And now he could sit on this bench and grieve for more general things: his mother’s loss of her retirement, the loss of his own career, for that time in L.A. when he had sat watching the World Series with Yvonne, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy.